Proposal

Infinitus — size, mass, and usage proposal

This is not a Hollywood saucer with make believe gravity plate in the floor.  It is a proposal for a ship whose rooms can be heavy in two honest ways: 1G Accelerate (Bloom Mode) and 1G spin (Bud Mode). The sizes below are chosen so spin can give about one Earth gravity at a turn rate people can live with, using physics we already have.

The model you see is proportional, not meter-true. Think of it as the flower. These figures are the ship that flower would have to be.

The two poses

Bloom Mode is for flying. The petals open flat, the engines are on, and “down” is acceleration through the dome floors. The open flower is about 340 m across. The Pistil Core is still 200 m from crown to engines.

Bud Mode is for coasting. The petals fold straight up, the engines are off, and “down” is spin through the outer wall of each GEODE. The closed flower is about 230 m across. The core length does not change. The standing petals are about 80 m tall.

Bloom is wider, like an open flower.  Bud is more compact, which is what you want for a spinning body.

Pistil Core (the stem)

Length: 200 m. Diameter: 36 m.

It holds the spine, tanks, power, engines, docking, and the main lift through the ship. It does not have to be a place you live. Living is in the GEODEs. The core is bone and engine.

Eight GEODE petals (the Domes)

Each GEODE is a crystal-dome habitat: disc 80 m across (40 m radius), dome about 24 m high in the middle. Floor on the disc: about 5,000 m² — roughly a large city block, or a big greenhouse. All eight together: about 40,000 m² of main floor. That is a small town, not a cockpit.

That is enough room to walk, farm, workshop, and sleep without stacking people like a submarine.

Why this size? The spin math (Bud Mode)

Hollywood skips this. Reality cannot.

Spin “gravity” is just outward press: the farther you are from the center, and the faster you turn, the heavier you feel.

If the walking deck in Bud sits about 115 m from the centerline (inner hinge about 90 m, plus the dome standing outward):

• 1.0 g (Earth) at about 2.8 rpm — one turn every 21 seconds. That matches “spinning slowly.”

• 0.8 g at about 2.5 rpm.

• 0.38 g (Mars) at about 1.7 rpm.

At 115 m, head-to-foot gravity only changes by about 2%. On a tiny spinning can, that change is brutal and people get sick. On Infinitus it is gentle. That is the whole reason the ship is hundreds of meters across, not fighter-sized.

A 30-meter Hollywood hull spinning for 1 g would have to whip around many times a second. That is a ride, not a home. Infinitus is large so the spin can be slow.

Bloom Mode (the push)

When the engines fire, “down” is toward the engines. The petals open flat so those same GEODE floors line up with that push. You walk on the disc, under the crystal sky, while the ship actually changes speed.

How hard you can push depends on the engine we do not pretend to have invented.

One g of thrust on a ship this heavy needs hundreds of meganewtons — far beyond chemical rockets. That is a future fusion or high-thrust engine case.

Useful near-term Bloom is docking, turnover, and course burns at a few hundredths to a few tenths of a g. The rooms still have a real floor during the burn. Between burns, you fold to Bud and live in spin gravity.

So Infinitus does not need magic gravity for the long wait. It only needs a real engine for the short pushes. Hollywood needs magic for both.

Mass (order of magnitude)

These are engineering guesses, not a shipyard quote. Dry habitat, no propellant:

• Eight pressure hulls: about 6,000 tonnes

• Radiation shielding (water and polyethylene in the walls and storm shelters): about 12,000 tonnes

• Interiors, farms, air, water in use: about 6,000 tonnes

• Core, stems, leaf supports, joints: about 8,000 tonnes

• Power, life support, radiators: about 4,000 tonnes

Dry ship: about 36,000 tonnes.

For scale: the ISS is about 450 tonnes. A large cruise ship is in the 100,000-tonne class. Infinitus sits between a space station and an ocean liner — a village that can leave.

Shielding is the heavy part, on purpose. Water in the walls is radiation cover, heat sink, and spin ballast. You pay in tonnes, not in imaginary physics.

Propellant is not in that number. It depends on the engine and the trip. The fuel tanks live in the Pistil Core and would dwarf everything if you demanded 1 g for weeks. That is an engine problem at the root of the ship’s decisions. The engine and propulsion can be chosen and changed over time; they do not change the structure. It is not a reason to fake gravity.

Who lives there

A comfortable load is 300 to 500 people. Tight surge, maybe 800. Much beyond that, it stops being a home and becomes a packed station.

Multiple domes means one GEODE can be sealed or repaired while the others keep life going. Farms in their own dome keep soil, bugs, and humidity away from the workshops.

What it is for

During mid-voyage or while orbiting a planet: Bud Mode. Engines off. Slow spin. People living with weight, as if on a small world.

When you must accelerate: Bloom Mode at 1 g. Petals open. Burn. Then fold up to coast.

First jobs that make sense: a spinning station in high orbit; a cislunar ferry; an Earth–Mars cycler. You do not need interstellar engines to justify the flower. You need a place to live in space this century, without gravity plating.

Why not a Hollywood ship

A sleek 150 m saucer with Earth-normal decks is a drawing. To spin that small for 1 g, you get sick. To thrust that small at 1 g, you still have no gravity when the engines cut. So the drawing cheats and puts a gravity machine in the floor.

Infinitus is larger, slower, and stranger-looking because it refuses that cheat. The bloom exists so one set of rooms can use engine-down and spin-down, which point in different directions. The leaf supports and rigid stems exist so that fold is a structure, not a cartoon.

Useful, here, means weight you can live in, with motion we already understand. The flower is the mechanism.